The awakened Arcosian Bio-Steel was a secret sun in Astra's inventory, its silent, rhythmic pulse a constant reminder of the path he walked. It was a symbol of his greatest theft, a piece of Frieza's own power now hibernating in the palm of his enemy's most useful pawn. But the steel was dormant, a seed waiting for the right conditions to sprout. He lacked the power, the knowledge, and the safe environment to forge it.
His attention returned to the more immediate, digital battlefield. The Saiyan-Tuffle war was entering its final, bloody act. The Tuffles, pushed to the brink of extinction, had abandoned conventional warfare. Their attacks became desperate, asymmetrical. They unleashed genetically engineered plagues tailored to Saiyan biology. They deployed logic bombs and self-replicating data-scourges into the Saiyan networks, aiming to cripple their infrastructure.
It was a war of unseen vectors and microscopic payloads, and King Vegeta's brute-force commanders were helpless. Ships carrying warriors would drop out of warp, their crews dead from a virus that attacked their adrenal systems. Power grids on conquered worlds would fail, their control systems erased by a rogue code.
The King's demands, transmitted through the black wristband, grew increasingly frantic. [STOP THIS. FIND THE SOURCE. END IT.]
Astra became the guardian of the Saiyan digital realm. He was no longer just an analyst; he was a physician fighting a pandemic of code. He deployed his Cognitive Partitions like a swarm of white blood cells, each one dedicated to a different task. One Partition ran constant diagnostics on the fleet's life-support systems, another monitored the planetary data-net for malicious code, a third worked on crafting digital antibodies—counter-viruses designed to seek and destroy the Tuffle plagues.
He fought a war of rapid evolution. The Tuffles would release a new scourge; Astra's Partitions would analyze it, isolate its signature, and deploy a countermeasure within hours. He was a single mind waging a billion-sided war in silence, his only battleground the flickering light of data streams.
It was during this frantic period that his Watchtower Partition, the one eternally scanning the cosmos for the anomalous energy signature, triggered a high-priority alert.
It had found another ripple.
This one was stronger, closer. It originated from the fringes of the system, near a gaseous giant the Saiyans used for fuel refining. The signature was identical to the first—a telltale spike of inter-dimensional energy—but this time, it was followed by a second, much fainter signal. A energy decay profile that was… biological. Organic.
Something had arrived. And it had left a trace of itself behind.
Astra isolated the data. The biological signature was unlike anything in the Saiyan or Tuffle databases. It was complex, potent, and bore markers of extreme cellular age and stability. It was the scent of something ancient and powerful.
A cold certainty settled in his gut. He was not just preparing for Frieza. He was not just fighting a war for a tyrant. There was another entity moving in the shadows of the galaxy, one that could step between worlds as he could. A hunter, or perhaps a rival cultivator of power. Its presence changed the calculus of everything.
He couldn't investigate directly. He was tethered to the King's war. But he could send a proxy.
He accessed the planetary defense grid, a system he knew intimately from his work on Project: Exodus. He targeted a single, long-range deep-space probe that was drifting dormant near the gas giant. With a series of encrypted commands, he woke it up, overwrote its primary mission parameters, and gave it a new directive: proceed to the coordinates of the energy ripple and scan for the biological residue. Maximum sensitivity. Utter secrecy.
Days passed. The unseen war against the Tuffle plagues continued, a draining, invisible conflict that cost Saiyan lives even in victory. Astra moved through it all with a detached efficiency, his primary mind focused on the war, one Partition on the Watchtower, and a new, third Partition dedicated solely to analyzing the incoming—and agonizingly slow—data stream from the rogue probe.
When the data finally arrived, it was fragmentary, corrupted by the gas giant's intense radiation belts. But it was enough.
The probe had found a debris field. Not of a ship, but of… flesh. Shards of a chitinous, organic armor that registered off the scale for density. Traces of a viscous, silver blood that evaporated into pure energy upon exposure to vacuum. And etched into the largest piece of armor, a symbol: a stylized, grasping hand surrounded by a halo of fire.
[Appraising: Unknown Biological Residue.]
[Composition: Hyper-Evolved Chitin, Concentrated Bio-Energy, Dimensional Stabilizing Enzymes.]
[Threat Level: Extreme. Entity possesses innate spatial manipulation abilities.]
And then, the final piece of data. A single, clean energy reading the probe had captured before its systems were fried by a residual energy pulse. A power level assessment.
[Power Level Estimate of Deceased Entity: 42,000]
Astra stared at the number. Forty-two thousand. It was a figure that dwarfed King Vegeta. It was a figure that belonged to a Galactic Emperor's elite soldiers. And this entity was dead. Killed by something in inter-dimensional transit, or by whatever it had encountered upon arrival.
The cosmos was not just vast; it was violently, lethally active. There were powers at play that made the Saiyan-Tuffle war look like a backyard brawl. He had been preparing for a hurricane, and he had just found evidence of a coming asteroid impact.
He erased all traces of the probe's mission, scouring its data and then sending a self-destruct command. The Watchtower Partition was now assigned a new, grim duty: not just to watch for the signature, but to model the capabilities of the entity that could kill a being with a power level of 42,000.
The war for Planet Vegeta was now the least of his concerns. He was fighting an unseen war on two fronts: one against a dying race of brilliant technologists, and another against a terrifying, unknown cosmos that had just announced its presence with a corpse. The clock was ticking faster than he had ever imagined.